An aged care facility in Page is ensuring its residents will have easy and natural interaction with the locals by supplying a coffee cart that is open to the whole community every morning of the week.
The Little Italy Village Cafe got off to a hugely successful start on Friday, with a crowd of people joining the residents and staff for an early-morning coffee.
The coffee cart, in the grounds of the Villaggio Sant' Antonio aged care facility, will now be open seven mornings a week in Burkitt Street, from 7am to 11am.
Inspired by the traditional Italian village cafe, Little Italy is designed around the idea that people of different ages naturally come together as part of everyday life.
The cafe will serve food and coffee prepared at Villaggio and is deliberately open to everyone, not just Villaggio residents and their families.
It is also the first dedicated cafe in the suburb of Page.
The cafe, in the front yard grounds of the aged-care facility, will welcome everyone from early-morning dog walkers to parents with young children to working-from-homers in the neighbourhood who need a caffeine hit.
Villaggio Sant' Antonio chief executive officer Giulia Jones said Canberra had an opportunity to demonstrate a different way of thinking about ageing and community.
"We want to challenge the idea that aged care should sit apart from the rest of society," she said.
Mrs Jones said she wanted the cafe to be the Page local.
"We want our residents to get to know everybody," she said.
"We want this to be your really great spot to come past for your early-morning coffee."
The cafe is also a part of the Foundation for Social Health's new Third Spaces Network, an Australian-first initiative to tackle loneliness by creating and supporting everyday places where social connection can happen naturally.
"Third spaces" are places outside home and work where people can spend time together informally, from cafes and libraries to community gardens, neighbourhood spaces and local meeting places.
The model being pioneered in Canberra aims to tackle two major social challenges at once: the separation of older Australians from everyday community life and growing levels of loneliness in the wider population. One in three Australians reports being lonely, but the figure is higher in Canberra with 40 per cent of locals experiencing loneliness.
"It's really important in aged care that people don't end up disconnected from the community and that we take care of each other's social health," Mrs Jones said.
"This is going to be one of the Third Spaces Network in Canberra. So if you're lonely, if you want someone to chat to, come down, hang out. This is going to be a great place for everybody."
Villaggio Sant' Antonio chair John Paul Romano said he hoped the cafe would bring together generations of Canberrans.
"We hope that it's a great gift of the Italian community back to the community of Canberra," he said.
